


BE=(886.0 M_x)/(R_[in meters] -738.3M_x ) (heart of a dead star)

by Chronolith



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Allura (Voltron)-centric, Blood and Injury, Developing Relationship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Major Character Injury, Physics, Platonic Relationships, Whump, allura whump, rated for descriptions of injury, theoretical physics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-20
Updated: 2018-03-20
Packaged: 2019-04-05 05:09:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14036871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chronolith/pseuds/Chronolith
Summary: Waking from cyro-sleep, Allura’s found, is a singular experience.One would think it was the slow slide into consciousness. An easy surfacing from a deep and dreamless sleep like a cursed maiden from some old story. A gentle glide into wakefulness with a sigh and a flicker of long lashes. At the very least, it should be somewhat easier on a patient’s system than the sudden hard, disorienting jerk into reality. An abrupt drop back into time and movement and being as if nothing had happened during the intervening period.Allura has found she intensely, rabidly hates it. Hates it so much her teeth hurt with depth of the emotion.Sometimes Allura's reckless tendencies have consequences.Or, I wanted an Allura whump fic and then lost control.





	BE=(886.0 M_x)/(R_[in meters] -738.3M_x ) (heart of a dead star)

The unending, undulating shriek of the alarm klaxons set a counterpoint to Allura’s own ragged breathing—a wet, hitching rasp that she could feel tremble up her throat and out her mouth like the pants of a dying animal. A broken and fragile thing that reminds her with every gasp that there’s probably a rib through her lung, digging into the tender flesh of that delicate organ with each breath she takes. And there’s a lovely, morbid thought to dwell upon as she tries to drag herself upright, fingers scrabbling to find purchase on the smooth metal walls as the Galra ship shudders around her like a great animal thrashing in its bonds. 

This was not at _all_ how her day was supposed to go.

Cold Allura, objective Allura, the Allura that _isn’t_ having a slow mental breakdown about how she is very likely to die on an Galra war cruiser of dubious design takes methodical stock in her, quite frankly, horrid situation.

One, she thinks to herself as she pulls her hobbling way down the darkened hallway lit only with the sputtering flickers of electrical fires, her ribs are certainly broken, and one is slowly driving through her lungs with every wretched breath. She’d already tried shapeshifting to move the broken bones away from fragile organs, but the resulting explosion of agony had left her fetal and gasping for far too long in the smoldering remains of the cruiser engine rooms. 

Two, she tells herself and tries to ignore the way her mental voice takes on the sing-song of a children’s rhyme— _one for sorrow, two for joy, three for girl_ —her leg is probably broken. She can feel the shattered edges of bone grind against each other with each shaking step she takes. The lighting flashes of pain and nausea roll up her spine in awful, roiling waves.

Three— _four for a boy, five for silver_ —pain or delirium has her giggling softly even as she struggles to draw breath into her ruined lungs. Three. She starts again. Three, she’s certainly concussed. Allura can feel the sickly seep of blood into her bound hair and down the side of her neck. That’ll be a fright to wash out, she muses. If she ever gets the chance.

Four. The ship heaves as if it rode storm-shaken waves, and she’s flung like a broken doll down the hallway, farther than her dragging steps had managed to bring her in the fifteen (twenty, thirty? Time moves like a children’s hop-scotch game, all sideways) dobashes of determined not-quite crawling. _Six for gold, seven for a secret, never to be told_. Four, she was trapped on a Galra cruiser that was slowly tearing itself apart as its propulsion drive implodes in glorious technicolour thanks to an over-zealous engineer determined to destroy the entire ship before Allura could finish stealing the secrets it harboured.

Not that the engineer had been successful. They’d both seen his failure in the flicker-flash of Pidge’s happy little program and the soft ding of the datachip as it sprang free—a tiny chime before the thunder crash of the engineer’s destruction of the scalar field protecting the engines from tachyon condensation.

Such a cheerful sound to play harbinger to such massive destruction.

Five, she counts and counts and counts again until she’s standing on her broken leg, all parts of her shaking as if they’d shake apart like the ship she’s going to die in. Sweat springs up all along her spine—a cold warning of her impending collapse. _Eight for a wish. Eight for a wish. Eight for a wish._ Her leg gives out underneath her in a supernova of agony and she fights not to scream. If she starts, she’ll never stop.

_Eight for a wish._

A purple mask fills her vision with burning eyes and glowing lines and she tries to startle backwards, but her leg is a symphony of fire and her lungs are slowly drowning in her own blood, so all she can do is gasp a wet rasp of breath and flail one hand at the apparition. Allura tries to shove her delusion away—push it behind her so she can focus on hauling herself down that hallway. To her lion. To her team. To her paladins. Her hand slaps weakly at the mask and then claws at it when she meets resistance.

“What? How did—“ Allura’s voice gives out mid-way through her incoherent question, ending in rasping moan as the Blade catches her hand and hauls her in one smooth motion up into their arms. Agony crashes through her body like lightning across a stormfront and she arches with the force of it, pants ragged and terrible against the neck of her apparition. She’s delusional with pain and terror. Allura’s certain of it, but she can’t find the breath to demand an explanation.

The Blade jogs down the hallway, each jostling step sending lines of chilling pain up her spine. Allura presses her face into the crook between neck and shoulder of her delusion and swallows hard against the roiling nausea that threatens to overtake her at each breath. She becomes slowly aware of a steady stream of apologies— _sorry, sorry, sorry shit shit shit I’m so sorry_ —rolling out of the Blade with every step he takes. 

Allura knows that voice. She knows that staccato clip that bites out each word like a bullet, like a challenge, like being forced to say anything at all was insult. She curls her hand around his shoulder and sobs a soft laugh. “A little short,” she grinds out, each gasping word driving the jagged blade of her rib through her lung a little more. “To be a Blade?”

Allura can feel Keith’s breath hitch, the break in his stride, and then the rumble of his incredulous laughter. “You’re making jokes? Now?”

Everything hurts, and they are trapped on a battlecruiser that’s tearing itself apart under the force of its own dying propulsion drives and all Allura can feel is wonder. _You came back_ , she wants to say if she could just find the breath. _You came back_. But her lungs are full of her own blood and it flecks her lips like macabre lipstick, a bloody froth that oozes out of her with every pained gasp. 

His mask hides his expression, but she can imagine the furious furrow between his brows, the stubborn downturn of his lips when he glances at her. Allura knows all the ways Keith hides his concern and worry under rage and fury. “Allura,” he starts, his voice breaks when an uneven step jostles her leg and rattles a pained moan out her mouth. “Allura, you need to tell them I’ve got you.”

She makes noise caught between confusion and agony. Her thoughts are a slip-slide of disconnected fragments floating between waves of flash-fire bright pain that dances along every nerve she has. 

“I don’t—” a sudden explosion rolls through the ship, metal shrieking and the faint muted pops of the cruiser’s containment systems cuts across his words like blast door coming down. Sudden. Terrifying. Final. 

Keith hisses out a flurry of profanity that dances across three languages and she’d laugh at the way he twists Galran curses around Earth slurs until it’s something almost poetic. He hugs her closer, whispers apologies when she writhes in agony, and sprints pell-mell for the hanger doors. The air fills with the particular ozone of blaster fire. That odd _blat-blat-blat_ noise of ricocheting lasers and near misses sings out around them. He tucks her head under his chin, the chill of his uniform easing the ever-present headache that beats like a drum between her eyes, and hunkers between two metallic crates.

“Allura,” he whispers, and she more feels than hears the low rumble of his voice. “Fuck, come _on_. You need to call the team.”

She flutters fingers towards her head and the ruin of her helmet, where she can feel blood still sluggishly seeping. “Hit head,” she gasps out. “Something broke.”

Keith’s fingers tighten around her minutely in frustration, and she pants through the spike of agony that rushes through her like water to fill a void. He rubs the line of his jaw across her temple in apology and she wonders if he even realizes that he’s done it—it’s such a Galran gesture. She remembers, the jagged edges of that memory catching at her, butting her head against a cold breastplate after falling from something she shouldn’t have been climbing—a fighter, perhaps, in the hangers—demanding reassurance and comfort after skinning the entire line of her shins. _You’ll be the death of me, cub_. A deep laugh and warm pressure of her father’s best friend’s jaw along her temple. The thrum of a purr rumbling under her tiny fingers. She wonders, hazy from pain in her body—along her shattered leg and burning chest; in her mind—memories catching at her with icy claws, if Keith knows how to make that sound.

“You have to call your lion,” he whispers to her even as he crouch-crawls through the hanger, a slip of moving darkness among the shadows. Keith cradles her so close she can hear the frantic beat of his heart. “You need to call Blue.”

It’s a desperate bid. But they are trapped, trapped and alone on a dying ship that breaks farther apart with each shudder. Allura’s not sure she can, temporary paladin that she is, just there until he comes back—until she has all her paladins back. She clutches at him and babbles something, words move out her mouth, but she can’t hear them, and nearly weeps with the pain.

Keith moves them deeper into the yawning darkness of the hanger. Heavy footfalls sound like a distant avalanche, bouncing off walls in alarming cacophony to provide the drumbeat counterpoint to wail of the klaxons. “You have to, Allura. You have to.”

She presses her face against his shoulder, trying to hide from each wave blinding pain that beats against her like the energy waves of a pulsar, and screams her need along the lion bond. 

_i’mherei’mherei’mhere_ , she sobs into the darkness of her own mind, reaching like a lost child out into the void. _Please, findmefindmefindme. Please_.

She can’t tell if she imagines the echoing roar in her desperation or if its real. For one long heartbeat, a jagged breath filling her lungs with pain and blood, there is nothing but deathly silence. Then the squeal of tearing metal shatters everything, so loud her teeth hurt with the sound. 

Allura feels more than hears Keith’s laughter, edged hysterical relief. “Holy _shit_ ,” he whispers against her hair. “And everyone said Red was overprotective.”

“I called,” she says, answering an unasked question. Chokes on the words, chest seizing around the rib that grinds deeper into her lungs, a jagged knife point of fire through her chest. “I called.”

“Yeah, you did,” he agrees, and he’s running, running, running. Sprints towards her lion with her clutched high to his chest. She can’t feel the fire of agony burning apart her body anymore. She drifts, distant and chilled, the remains of dead star. Observes with distant, baffled concern as he sprints up Blue’s ramp—her massive head slammed straight through the hole she’s rent. 

Coldness blooms across her body like water across parched ground, dousing her burning nerves. Shock or Blue, she thinks with wonder, stealing away her pain so she floats above it. Her thoughts jumble together in a mess of impressions, but she feels Blue’s rumbling purr against the base of her skull, under the pads of her fingers. _thankyouthankyouthankyou_ , she sob-sings-gasps into the velvet darkness of the lion bond. Sinks into it as if into fresh snow. All parts of her going numb.

“Can you,” Keith starts, stops as he studies her. Allura notes distantly that he’s deactivated his mask, so she can see his dark, dark, dark eyes and the lines between them. She reaches up a shaking hand to smooth those deep furrows away—she doesn’t want to see him so distressed. Not her paladin. Hers. Hers _first_. “Okay. No, you can’t.”

A spike of lightning punches through the cloaking chill settling along her bones when he eases them into Blue’s pilot chair. She gasps and writhes against it, vision sparking along the edges with agony, and Keith fits her more tightly against himself. Allura’s not sure what words she sobs out, protests against the movement and the pain, but he hums a wordless sound at her. Not quite the rumbling purr of assurance she remembers, but close. Close enough. She goes boneless against him, lets Blue spread coldness along her, stealing her breath and her pain.

“Okay,” Keith says, and she doesn’t think it’s to her. “Okay. Okay. We can do this.”

She makes a noise of agreement and finds the energy to pat his arm. He can, she thinks faintly as darkness creeps long the edges of her vision, he can probably do anything.

“Not sure about that,” Keith says, and there’s something in his voice caught between a laugh and a sob. 

_You came back_ , she wants to say, but her lungs are failing. _You came back_.

“Hey. Guys?” Keith calls. Allura curls her fingers around his wrist where it rests, lets her arm move bonelessly with his as he starts Blue’s initiation sequence. “Guys?”

_“Keith?” “Mullet?!”_

Allura moans against the sudden burst of squawking voices—the head throbbing in time with her erratic pulse, and presses her face against Keith’s shoulder as if she could use him block out the grating noise. He makes that rumble-hum of sound again, a thrum of comfort she more feels than hears.

“I have Allura,” he says into that din. “She’s hurt.”

“Where?” Shiro and Lance’s voices layer over each other. High to low. Panicked to calm. She sighs, low and hitching, and feels something unwind across her shoulders. There’s her paladins, she thinks. There they are. 

“We’re in Blue,” Keith says as his hands flash over the controls, each gesture a little more urgent than the last. “But she’s not responding to me.”

“Mullet,” Lance’s voice holds a tremble that even Allura in her battered, shattered state can hear. She makes a wordless sound of protest, fingers stretched towards the controls. Her paladin, hers, is hurting and she has to stop it. Keith catches her hand and pulls it away from the controls, fingers tightening over hers in silent warning. “Blue is a discerning lady,” Lance continues, trying to hide his mounting distress under teasing that falls flat, flat, _flat_. “She’s not gonna take any old paladin. Why isn’t Allura flying?”

Keith shifts her, so he can stare at her, eyes raking over her face, and she blinks up at him. “She can’t. She just. We need to get back to the castle. _Now_.”

“Mullet,” Lance starts.

“We’ll clear a path,” Pidge’s voice is hard and sharp, cutting over Lance’s like knife slice. A clear line connecting point to point. “Get her out of there.”

“What was she even doing in there,” Hunk wonders and Allura’s fingers spasm. She tucks herself more tightly against Keith. Doesn’t want to face the disapproval that she knows is coming. “We agreed to extract the data remotely.”

“Remote data extraction results in a 20% degradation of file integrity,” Pidge says—her voice is an ice field, perfectly flat and cold as a machine’s logic. “So.”

Allura can measure the silence that follows that statement in the distant pulses of pain that spark up her leg from the shattered bone and ruined knee, in the rasping breaths she drags into her lungs, in the way Keith drums his fingers against the armrests of Blue’s pilot chair.

 _So._

It’s really all the explanation needed. They needed that data, all of it, a loss of 20% could mean another failure with the teleduv. Another desperate fight where they only won because of sure dumb luck and deus ex secret assassin orders suddenly deciding to align with them. 

_So._

No choice, really. None at all.

So.

“I thought I was the impulsive one,” Keith mutters, so low she thinks he thinks that the coms won’t pick it up. He’s wrong, of course, because Blue likes to meddle. 

“You _are_ ,” Lance snaps.

“We can talk about why you were _also_ on that cruiser later,” Shiro say. Allura wants to laugh at the way Shiro’s impossibly calm voice makes them both sigh and curl in on themselves, just a little. “Just,” there’s a break in Shiro’s voice that breaks Allura’s heart. “Just get back to the castle.”

“Right,” Keith says, and his voice is a soldier’s careful neutral. She’s the only one who sees how his lip goes slowly white from how hard he bites it at Shiro’s tone. “We’re on our way.”

They are not, however, on their way. Blue remains with her face stubbornly smashed into the side an exploding cruiser and Allura can feel Keith’s mounting tension and frustration. He doesn’t swear, but she can hear the way his teeth grind as he drags on the controls with no response. She knows that frustration, remembers it from sitting huddled in an asteroid—terrified, frustrated, and desperate to return to her team. She knows it like she knows every letter of her own name.

“Gentle,” she rasps, swallows hard against the blood that froths in her mouth. Tries to ignore the bright copper taste and oozing texture as she swallows it down, down, down and fights not to throw it straight back up. 

“You have to—” a cough rattles her, and she ignores Keith’s attempt to hush her. “You have to ask gentle.”

Keith makes a frustrated sound low in the back of his throat and tries again, his movements less frantic, less demanding. Blue remains obstinately faceplanted in the side of the Galra cruiser. Not-so-distant explosions rock them like a ship on stormy seas, each tremble and jostle sending new scraping fingers of pain up her spine. Allura tries to swallow the sounds of agony that try to claw their way up her throat and out her mouth. Keith breathes out his mouth hard, rolls his head against Blue’s pilot chair, and tries again.

“Gentle,” she says, a breath of sound that’s more a wet popping of her lips than an actual word.

“Gentle,” Keith repeats, the word an inhuman growl. “Right. Fuck. Blue, the fuck do you _want_ ,” he snarls. “Your pilot is gonna fucking _die_ , so just help me out on this one, you miserable bag of wires.”

Allura plucks at his arm in helpless distress as a cough rattles her hard enough to shake them both. She wants to say he’s got to be calm, he’s got to ask, got to be humble and let Blue work with him. But her lungs are a sea of blood that spills out of her mouth with every breath. 

Keith vibrates like an ungrounded wire. “Fuck, just _please_ work with me!”

Blue rears her massive head back just as the entire cruiser splits straight down the middle, great pieces of machinery—twisted beyond recognition—fly past them like shooting stars. Allura can feel Blue’s exasperation and faint fondness. She presses her face against Keith’s shoulder and lays a trembling hand on his wrist, feeling the tension sing through him like a battle song. 

“Gentle,” she whispers into his shoulder, and even she’s not sure if it’s a command or a description.

His response is an impressive flood of profanity before he huffs out a noise that tries to be a snarl and a laugh at once. “Please is the magic word, huh? Should have guessed that from Lance’s former lion.”

“I heard that, Mullet!” Lance barks. “Be good to my ladies. They are beautiful and perfect and deserve to be treated like the queens they are!”

“I’m rescuing your ladies from an exploding ship,” Keith snaps back. “That’s plenty good.”

“Regular knight in emo armour, you are,” Lance responds as Blue’s overhead displays light up with Red’s fire.

“Do you guys really have to do this now?” Hunk complains. Allura watches with muted interest as Yellow bodily removes a trio of Galra fighters with one easy slam. Keith and Blue dart through the opening with Green fast on their heels, chasing off any pursuers. 

Allura wants to laugh. She wants to sooth Hunk’s anxious worries. Wants to reassure them all that she’s fine, she’s fine, everything’s fine. But each breath is a fight, a battle for even wisps of air, each harder than the last. 

“I’ve got an approach to the Castle,” Keith says, his voice an eerie sort of still that does nothing to mask his vibrating tension. “Just keep that other cruiser off us.”

“Uh,” Lance responds. “Don’t think that’s gonna be a problem.”

It’s a struggle to tilt her head to see the rear displays, but the pyrotechnic display of Black shredding the last Galra cruiser with her mouth blade—wings resplendent and blazing—is worth the effort. “Oh,” she says softly. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” Keith and Lance say at once, voices in sync in odd symphony. “ _Oh_.”

“Pidge, Lance, clear out the rest of those fighters,” Shiro commands as if he hadn’t just single-handedly destroyed a Galra cruiser three times the size of his lion. His voice is calm, calm, calm like a placid mountain river—all the dangerous currents and jagged rocks hidden under deep water. “Hunk, escort Blue. Keith—”

“On it,” Keith says, fitting seamlessly back into their dynamic. Allura sighs as an odd contentment blooms through her ravaged body. She’s dying, she thinks faintly, but she has all of her paladins back, so that’s fine. Puzzle pieces fitting back together and she’s content to let go like this.

“Don’t you fucking _dare_ ,” Keith snarls into her hair. Presses the edge of his jaw hard to her temple— that oddly Galran, uniquely Galran, gesture jarring out her slow slide to oblivion—and rumbles out a noise without translation. “Don’t you dare fucking die now.”

And there’s nothing she can do in the face of that desperate, furious plea but comply—to fight for each breath, to blink the darkness out her vision, to cling with bleeding fingers to this moment and the next and the next and next after that. 

“Coran,” Shiro says—his voice still that perfectly even command, as if stress did not rest her uneasy fingers upon him. “Be prepared to wormhole away the second the lions are secured.”

“Of course, Number One,” Coran’s voice echoes back that unperturbed calm, but then Coran had been a soldier for long centuries before the lions’ construction and would probably be a soldier for long centuries after her death.

“Would you fucking stop,” Keith snaps, making her blink in muzzy confusion. “I swear you are fucking worse than Shiro with this morbid shit.”

Allura’s not sure she’s ever heard Keith swear quite so often. Or perhaps at all. Her memory fuzzes around the edges like her vision—everything gone fragmented and distorted through the haze of pain.

“I swear when I’m stressed,” Keith grinds out between breaths that are too slow and even to be anything other than viciously controlled. “You trying to get yourself killed is very stressful.”

Allura wonders if she should apologize. She wonders for what.

“I’ll make you a list,” Keith says and Allura makes a soft sound of assent. 

Time continues to move its hop-scotch, sideways ramble from point to indistinct point. Each blink seems to be longer, seems to be an eternity between ragged, jagged breaths, and she counts time with each poetic curse that Keith spits out. Measures distance with each shout from her paladins, each short, bitten-off command Shiro gives. Holds onto consciousness by collecting every word and pant that spills out her paladins like they were precious jewels.

Allura doesn’t doze, nothing as easy as sleep steals over her, but she feels herself slip-sliding into dreaming. Keith’s arms an iron cage keeping her locked into her shattered body, his voice—clipped off and furiously spat words—and an anchor tying her back to the realm of the living, but her mind drifts. Memories and guiltily-held longing tangling together in a mess of confusion. 

Keith swears, low and vicious and darkly violent. She closes her eyes as sound washes over her, hazy-memory overlaying pain-hazy present. 

“We are going talk,” he rumbles at her. “About your reckless tendencies.”

“Yes,” Shiro’s voice cuts in, and she can hear the heavy pressure of worry riding just under his calm control. “We definitely are.”

“You’re getting me into trouble,” Keith mutters against her hair. “ _Again_.”

It’s an oddly comforting complaint. Newly familiar and drags her out of the aching claws of memory. She keeps her fingers curled around his wrist, gives herself the illusion that she’s piloting with him. Blue hums her agreement, presses the feeling of _together-safe-home_ against her mind like a compress to bruised flesh. “Not,” she rasps, coughs around the ache and the blood. “Not sorry.”

He huffs out a sound that pretends to be a laugh. “We clearly made a mistake letting you and Lance hang out so much.”

“I heard that,” Lance says, but his tone is more tired and worried than annoyed. “My company is a joy. You should be so lucky to be in it.”

They slide into banter as easily as slipping on a comforting sweater, a favorite robe. She rests her head against Keith’s shoulder and feels as much as hears his snap and snarl at Lance, who matches him like the tide coming in against the rocks—loud and constant. Somehow, impossibly, she finds it a soothing comfort, and drifts along the ebb and flow of their bickering—floating in a haze of shock and muted pain.

Time skips oddly, the world moving around her in jumbled impressions of sound, thrumming agony like a fire in the blood, and the sudden jarring thud of Blue coming to rest. Her lion floods her senses with an insistent press of _home-safe-home_ , smothering the spike of restless anxiety. Allura has the impression of questions going unanswered, repeated with barely-controlled and increasing desperation, but she is only just aware of the world through mounting shock like an ice wall between her and vast ocean of hurt that is her body. She can’t order the words into any sort of sense to answer them—her own words tangling together in her head like so much detritus caught in the currents of pain.

A shock of white hair and tight grey eyes, lyric swearing in a language that slides through syllables like a song, and a gentle, gentle, gentle hands moving her from Keith’s grasp. Voices lay over each other to form a symphony of worry, concern, and muted fear. 

She is moved, she is hushed, she is treated like slowly shattering glass.

The sudden, burning white of the castle burns across her vision like snow glare and she tries to hide her face against the solid wall moving her.

“Man, sorry Princess, I know it hurts,” Hunk says softly, his voice as gentle as his hands. “Man, man, fuck,” Hunk rambles—she can hear the anxiety spiking across his tone. “I really wanna tell you I told you so. I really wanna tell _everyone_ I told you so because you and Keith being all secretive never works out well for either one of you. Really, we should fit you both with tracking collars or something. I’m pretty sure Pidge already has some designs. But you’re so hurt. So imma wait and tell you I told you so later and make you promise to stop doing this. Okay? I really need you to stop doing this.”

Hunk’s low voice and anxious ramble leads Allura back to her own body, her own time, and out of the time-skip, un-reality of shock. She sobs, open-mouthed and panting, as every nerve reminds her in shrieking cacophony of their existence. As gentle as Hunk is, her leg is so much meat and liquid-fire agony sliding along the edges of broken bone where they grind against each other. She can hear the wet, uneven rattle of her breath as it bubbles and pops on every exhale, shudders through every inhale. 

The tiny, cold piece of herself that watches everything and provides icy commentary notes that she can no longer feel her ribs, only a growing tightness that ratchets down across her chest with every breath. Obstructive shock, she thinks to herself as she pants and tries not to writhe with the pain, traumatic pneumothorax. She is dying.

“Not yet, you aren’t,” Pidge’s voice is as cold as the icy swell of shock sweeping through her chest. “But you seem determined to do your best.”

Something in Pidge’s nearness, her tightly-contained rationality, pulls at Allura. The jarring dissonance of her tiny paladin’s ruthlessly controlled rage with her tender touch as she helps Hunk settle Allura onto the examination table tugs at Allura’s awareness. The feeling of something left undone, something left unfinished, something that she must do eats at her even as her vision fractures and clouds. 

Her fingers flutter and pluck at Pidge’s thin arms, tremble in the grasp of her slim hands. Something left undone—something that _must_ be done, or it was all for naught.

“—chip!” Allura gasps out, the force of the word flecks Pidge’s pallid cheek where she’s bent low to hear. Allura pulls at her with all the shuddering strength left in her. “In, in, there.”

Words flee from her, nothing but puffs of breath that barely move the wild rat’s nest of Pidge’s wheat-blonde hair. 

But Pidge is nothing if not terribly, horribly clever and understanding blooms across her face after not even an eyelashes’ flutter of confusion. 

“Seriously,” Hunk asks, not quite chiding but something like shocked horror hovers in his voice, when Pidge’s clever fingers pluck with a pickpocket’s ease through Allura’s uniform.

“Yeah,” Pidge says and there’s so much packed into that slip of a word—all informal dismissiveness that hides a wealth of feeling. Allura sighs, all pieces of her going slack as Pidge holds up the chip to the light where it glitters, terribly fragile, and throws dancing spots of colour across the room like a child’s crystal. With a little flick of her fingers, Pidge makes it disappear somewhere into her uniform. Allura sighs again, relief or something like a kissing cousin to it, steals through her.

“I hate everything about this,” Hunk complains. “All of it.”

“Yeah,” Pidge says again. Her voice is still an ice field, but there’s a note bitter exhaustion that sweeps through it like the wind. “Go make sure Lance hasn’t actually strangled Keith.”

“He wouldn’t,” Hunk says, tone mulish and stubborn. “You know he wouldn’t.”

Pidge pulls back from Allura, one hand still pressed against the ruin of Allura’s rib cage, and Allura can see where the blood stains the bitten nails of her fingers. “I’m going to strip her down to get her into the healing pods,” she says, soft and utterly merciless. “Are you sure you want to be here for that?”

Hunk goes as wrenchingly pale as his skin tone will allow and swallows hard. “I’ll get Coran.”

“Already here, dear boy,” Coran calls. Allura closes her eyes against the universe of sorrow that dwells in her uncle’s eyes. There’s a memory that hovers at the edges of her mind—Coran worried, chiding, lifting her from her father’s best friend’s arms. “Go along. We’ll have her popped into the pods and fixed up in no time at all!”

Hunk looks at Allura and then back at Coran. The doubt plain as if it were written there in the most basic of common scripts. Allura knows then precisely the depth of her injuries when Hunk’s utter faith technology fails him. 

“Tell Shiro that we’re putting her in the cryo-pods,” Pidge tells him as soft as new kitten fur. “He should know.”

Still there is hesitation, Hunk drops one hand over Allura’s, his wide palm covering all of hers. She turns her hand in his to slowly and with great effort wraps her fingers around his. 

“When you get out of the cryo-pods,” he says, soft like they are sharing secrets. “I am going to tell you I told you so until the heat death of the universe.” He pauses, blinks, and cocks his head to the side. “Not that I think that heat death of universe is actually possible because that’s, like, a gross misunderstanding of the third law of thermodynamics and besides we know that the universe has, like, way more entropy than we ever initially thought because of super massive blackholes—which you basically create and destroy on a whim every time you open a worm hole. I mean, exactly how the fuck does that work? Because the current cosmic event horizon is s_CEH=2.6±0.3×〖10〗^122 k, but you have got to be introducing _at least_ —”

“Hunk.” Pidge’s voice stops him mid-sentence, his eyes flicking to hers, wide and unblinking. “You need to go tell Shiro.”

“Okay, But I—”

“Go.” Pidge’s command is as absolute as divine law. 

Hunk absconds.

Pidge heaves a sigh that seems to start at her toes and gain strength like an ancient engine slowly accelerating as it moves through her body until it explodes from her in a great heave of breath. For a moment her tiny hand presses hard against Allura’s ribs and she makes a faint, pained sound of protest. Pidge looks at Allura, then looks at the sky as if petitioning some unknown god for strength.

“I saw this coming,” she says conversationally as her quick fingers flick through the clasps of Allura’s uniform. “I thought maybe I was wrong—that you couldn’t be this flavor of stupid—so I dismissed it.”

They both hiss as Pidge eases the grasping cloth of the uniform off Allura’s shoulders and down her chest, bruised flesh slowly uncovered in a parody of a lover’s benediction. When they get to lurid black and purple and seeping red mess of Allura’s ribs—they can both see where one rib is snapped clean in half, one jagged edge pushing through the muscle and skin, shockingly white flashes surround by the deep red of rent tissue—Pidge delicately lays one pallid hand against that dark and ruined flesh.

The cold of Pidge’s small hand against her burning, aching skin makes Allura shiver all over like a race horse run too far, too fast. The look on Pidge’s face is as unforgiving as a winter storm. “I will not be making that mistake again.”

Allura realizes with startling clarity that Pidge does not like making mistakes. A thing she knew, but the tight expression on her paladin’s face, her swift motions as she eases Allura out of her uniform, confirms it in ways Allura never quite understood before. Pidge does not like making mistakes, not about the ones she loves.

Coran holds her soft and tender as Pidge works the uniform off her legs, as careful and slow with it as she would be with a complicated bit of code. Even then Allura bites her lips until her mouth is flooded with the copper-tang of her own blood.

“There’s a girl,” Coran says, and his voice is thick with emotions none of them want to look at too closely. “We’ll have this off you as quick as a yupper after a marluk. Don’t you worry.”

“Sorry,” she whispers—all the breath that she has left she gives over to that fragile apology.

Coran sighs, smooths a hand through the unbound tangle of her hair. “You are too much like your father sometimes. Far too like.”

She blacks out briefly when they pull the cryo-suit over her shattered knee and fractured thigh. The pain sweeping her under and tumbling her about like a riptide. Comes back screaming as suit molds itself to her ribs, forcing bones and cartilage and fragile tissue back into alignment with unkind strength. Continues to scream, a high and undulating sound of pure terror, as Coran and Pidge scramble to back her into the cryo-pods.

Allura fights with the last vestiges of strength she has left against going back into that metal thief of time and love and everything precious Allura has ever known. She plucks at their unforgiving hands and wails with what breath she can drag into the ruin of her lungs. Begs and begs and begs not to back into the cold and dark and the endless waiting. She can’t do it again. She _can’t_.

Coran croons soothing words, his hands tender and sure and firm as they press her inexorably back into the slender coffin of the pod. 

Pidge reaches up to cup Allura’s face, palms and rough fingers an inescapable cage over Allura’s face, and she drags Allura’s face down to stare into her too young, too serious eyes. “We’ll be here when you wake up. We will.”

Allura weeps bitter denials, tears a river over her cheeks and she can taste their salt on her lips. Mouths the word when breath fails her. Presses fingers to the cool dome of the pod as it closes around her, encasing her in ice and timelessness. Coran’s face is a mask of sorrow as the healing frost turns her breath to smoke. Pidge presses her hands back against Allura’s from the other side. Palm to palm. Fingertip to fingertip. 

Slow tears slide down her paladin’s face as the air around Allura cools, stills, and pulls her into undreaming darkness.

///

Waking from cryo-sleep, Allura’s found, is a singular experience.

One would think it was the slow slide into consciousness. An easy surfacing from a deep and dreamless sleep like a cursed maiden from some old story. A gentle glide into wakefulness with a sigh and a flicker of long lashes. At the very least, it should be somewhat easier on a patient’s system than the sudden hard, disorienting jerk into reality. An abrupt drop back into time and movement and being as if nothing had happened during the intervening period.

Allura has found she intensely, rabidly hates it. Hates it so much her teeth hurt with depth of the emotion.

Coran catches her as she tumbles forward, aluminosilicate disappearing from her beneath her hand. She fills her lungs with a desperate gasp of air, phantom pain running along the inside of her ribs, down her thigh, and she keeps herself from dragging her hands over each bump and space of her bones through sheer stubborn will.

“There you are, right as rain,” Coran chirps.

“Coran,” she finds herself sighing. “It rained fire on Altea.”

“And it was a beautiful sight.”

They grin at each other stupidly. It’s a game between the two of them to tell the paladins each greater and more ridiculous stories about Altea. Dragons and seas of shifting sand and great colossi of metal and magic. They left the paladins to wade through the stories—each one two lies and one truth. It’s a silly, foolish game, but it eased the hurt some. Eased the utter desolation of a planet destroyed, a people erased like a faulty bit of code—helped to hide the unending ache of absence as if the loss of Altea punched a hole right in the middle of space-time itself.

Allura lets Coran pull her upright and then turn her from one side to another to inspect her. She shivers in the still air of the medical bay, memory of the cryo-pods’ chill lingering in her bones. 

“There you are,” Coran repeats, softer. “The cryo-pods certainly do work wonders. Though I do wish you weren’t quite so dedicated to testing their effectiveness.”

Allura huffs a laugh despite herself. “It’s not like I plan these little trips,” she protests. “Things just happened.”

“If I had a caeger for every time I heard that,” Coran says more than a little snippily. “From either you or your father I would be richer than one of the Hutts of the Corinthian system.”

She catches his hands in hers and cocks her head. “I’m sorry,” she says, tugging on his hands the way she had when she was small and had been misbehaving yet again. “I’m sorry.”

“You aren’t,” Coran tells her—suddenly serious, his playful foolishness set aside like an ill-fitting coat. “You are sorry that you got caught. You are sorry that you caused your paladins’ pain and me distress. But you are not sorry you did what you did.”

She moves to pull her hands from his grasp, to wrap her arms around herself and tuck herself away, but he’s got her hands caught fast. She looks away and lets her hair fall like a curtain, hiding her face from view. “Perhaps. But we needed that data, all of it.”

“Did you?” Coran asks, calm and gentle and relentless. He tucks her hair behind her ear and watches her with serious eyes. “Your paladins’ didn’t seem to think so.”

“Keith did,” Allura not quite snaps. “That’s why he was on the cruiser, wasn’t it? He had the same idea as I had.”

Coran studies her for a long moment before sighing deeply. “I do not believe that our wayward Black Paladin is the best barometer for determining the relative wisdom of a plan.” 

Allura scowls at Coran. “He did perfectly well as Black Paladin.” Coran eyes her for a moment before his eyebrow arches slowly. “After a thoroughly reasonable adjustment period,” Allura amends. “And besides, Kolivan wouldn’t have let him go if the idea was so bad.”

Coran coughs lightly into his fist. “It seems the youngest Blade as about as forth coming with his plan as you were about yours.”

She chews on the inside of her cheek and fights to keep from squirming under Coran’s patient, entirely too understanding study of her. It doesn’t work. It never does, and she heaves a sigh under his steady scrutiny. “You won’t accept an apology, you won’t accept my reasons, and you won’t let the subject drop,” she says, managing not to whine only through prodigious effort. “What exactly do you want me to do?”

That gets her a disgusted sound from Coran and then a heavy sigh. He runs a hand through her hair, gently untangling the knots he finds there—dried blood and sweat making a nightmare of her locks, the cryo-pods may be many things, but a refresher they were not—and says nothing for several long minutes. “At the risk of sounding repetitive, or treating this like one of your misadventures from when you were just a little thing, I want you to actually think about what you have done.”

She opens her mouth to argue and Coran tugs at a knot hard enough to make her grimace. She takes the warning as intended and shuts up.

“Your father trained you to be confident in your command, to trust in your instincts,” Coran continues, not looking at her but instead spreading the sweep of her hair out in his hands, moving through the mess with great delicacy. “And this is all to the good. But you can be secretive in your decisions, deaf to the worries of your allies, and stubborn in the face of your mistakes.”

Allura feels small and uncertain and foolish in ways she’s not felt since she was small. She twists her fingers together, studying the blood dried under the nails, in the cracks of her knuckles. “Are they angry?”

“Your paladins?” Coran asks without looking up from his task.

She makes a small sound of assent, shoulders curling inward. It’s a stupid question, and she knows it, but somehow, she has to hear it answered.

“Of course,” he confirms. “They are each of them angry in their own ways. Except perhaps Keith, our wandering paladin seems to be of mind with you, but he has his own measure of approbation from his fellows to face.”

Allura can’t help but laugh a little at that. “Has he left again, then?”

Something behind her ribs twangs at that. A new, cold fear twisting in her chest at the idea of being left. She was never so mentally delicate before. Abandonment issues, she realizes with a nasty start, that’s what that aching, desperate feeling was. The terrified need to keep everything she loved right where she could see it. The fear that if she blinked it would all be gone— _they_ would all be gone, and she’d be left alone again.

“No,” Coran says softly, so soft. “He’s still here. Haunting the observation decks and training halls. Waiting as they all wait for you to wake up. You frightened them.”

 _Frightened us all_ , she hears in the sweeping undercurrents of his statement. Allura catches her guardian’s hands in her own and squeezes them gently. She can feel the delicate tremble in his fingers and runs her thumbs over the backs of his knuckles, feeling the fine, thin skin there. He’s getting old, she realizes with blood turning to ice water, too old for her nonsense.

“I’m sorry,” she says. Sorry for so many things that she cannot begin to put into words. 

Coran stares into her eyes, gaze taking inventory of her face, and then pulls her into a hard, back-cracking embrace. She squeaks under the pressure and pats his back awkwardly. He presses her face to his shoulder and rocks with her, just a gentle little movement side-to-side, but she melts into it. 

“Death is not suffered by those who die,” he says into her hair. “It is born by those who are left behind, and you know that.” He pulls away from her and she wants to flinch from the wetness welling at the corners of his eyes. “I know you know that.”

Allura can only nod, grief and guilt twin fists around her throat rending her mute. 

Coran ruffles her hair and smiles an odd half smile. “Reckless,” he says. “And in need of a shower.”

She makes a face at that, feeling the dried blood pull at the roots of her hair, along the cryo-healed cuts and faded wounds that linger only in memory. “I do. Could you?”

Allura can’t quite find words to explain the request and finds herself fluttering her hands in mute supplication.

“I’ll tell your paladins,” Coran says. 

She catches him in a tight hug—eyes burning in self-indulgent tears she refuses to shed. “Thank you.”

“They will want to speak with you themselves,” he warns. “And I’ll not let you hide behind me or your title.”

Allura cringes a little, but nods dutifully. She didn’t realistically think that she could get away with not talking to her paladins, to not having to face the consequences for her decision, but she’d hoped to put if off until she could find the words to defend herself. Muster her arguments and her justifications in the face of their inevitable disapproval and distress. Shield herself behind her station and nominal position as commander. She thought she’d have _time_.

But looking at Coran, feeling the fine tremble in his hands as he steers her towards her quarters and watches him walk away looking tired and old and frailer than she ever remembered, she realizes that they’ve all had that time. All the time to stew and worry and wonder. Asking for even more time in the face of that, she realizes, would be cruel.

Allura ponders her options, laying them out in her mind like cards on a table—who to approach first, who would need to be assuaged, charmed, or cajoled. A manipulative thought, she realizes. A diplomat’s thought. She wonders if her mother would be proud that she’s finally come around to that subtle, delicate way of thinking, or horrified.

She lets the water beat at her shoulders, turning the tile at her feet a dull, ruddy red with the dried blood that sluiced off her body, out of her hair. She makes a face at her nails as she drags them through her hair, scrapping at the dried blood behind her left ear and in the rat’s nest at her nape. Finds herself stretching out streaming tendrils of her hair just to watch it seep red to pink to white. So much blood. Without her shapeshifting abilities, without the latent magic in her veins, she wonders if she would have survived. 

Genetics placed a heavy hand on fate’s dice, but she’s painfully, horribly aware of how fickle a thing that could be.

Her fingers tremble a little, as she picks apart the last of the tangles until her hair lays smooth and sleek down her back. Continue to tremble as she slowly, carefully folds herself into a towel, buffing her hair dry while her feet dangle off the edge of the bed. She’s stalling as much to put off for an hour, for two, the talks she’s dreading, as to give herself time to pull herself together. The list of her paladins arranges and rearranges itself in her head in endless combinations—by order of who would be angriest, by order of those she’s most likely to win the argument, by order of the greatest betrayal.

Allura is saved in the end by a crisp, professional knock on her door. She looks at her informal attire and makes a face. Too late now to hide behind the trappings of station and rank. She’ll have to face him in comfortable attire, slightly dripping hair, and bare feet. She wonders, briefly, furtively, if the apparent vulnerability will help her cause.

“Shiro,” she says softly in greeting as her door swings open. “I guess you heard?”

Shiro looks down at her, and she is struck by exhaustion in his gaze—held in the tightness of the corners of his eyes, the grim line of his mouth. “Coran said that you were out of the cryo-pods,” he confirms, tone clipped and formal as she’s not heard it in quintaents. “May I come in?”

He would, of course, retreat and allow her the dignity of her space if she sent him away, Allura knew. But at the cost of a further fracturing of the trust between them. She steps aside and ushers him in with one hand.

“I imagine that you’d like to talk about the cruiser?” She asks and hates with every piece of her the muted formality of her tone. Aches with the distance of it.

He nods—a tiny, crisp gesture. “If you have time?” He seems to notice her disheveled state all at once, a faint flush climbing across his cheekbones and she watches it with dumb fascination. “It can, of course, wait until you are settled. The cryo-pods—”

“Shiro,” Allura can’t help the soft, fond tone as she cuts across his attempt to excuse himself. “I don’t think it can wait.”

He sighs and looks away from her, the grim set of his jaw returning like an unwelcome houseguest. “I thought we might talk about … chain of command.”

An odd way, Allura reflects, to begin a rebuke, but not unlike her paladin. She’s had enough time to map all the ways he retreats into formality, structure, and the particular obfuscating clarity of military order when distressed. Had time to be frustrated by its false distance when he was there. Had time to miss it like knife in the heart when he was gone. She offers him a small smile. “Alright. Chain of command.”

She watches with a feeling of infinite fondness as he draws in a deep breath—shoulders broadening, spine straightening—before turning to face her, hand clasped behind him, feet braced. “I realize we never really discussed the chain of command since I, um,” he flounders for a moment and she, out of unkind curiosity, lets him, “returned?” 

He scowls at the question in his tone and she bites the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing. 

“Since I, er,” now it is her turn to flounder gracelessly. “Filled the vacancy left by Lance?”

She grimaces before she can stop herself at the artless phrase.

“Since you became the Blue Paladin,” Shiro corrects—voice kind, firm and broking no argument. “Yes. It … changes things.”

Allura blows out a breath, causing her hair to flutter damply. “It does. Though I think we can figure it out.”

Shiro looks down at his hands before looking back up at her—the seriousness and hurt in them sweeps her breath away as surely as the rib through her lung did. “I have to know where the line is,” he says. “I have to—to know when you are going to, erm.”

Allura bites her lip and looks away. Unfair of her, perhaps, to ask him to do this in the middle of her space. “Go off on my own and completely ignore both your orders and all good sense?”

He gives her a long, searching look. “Please don’t make light of this.”

“I’m not,” she assures him. Looks down at her hands where they tremble and then drops onto the edge of her bed as if her legs could no longer hold her. (They can’t.) “I absolutely am not. I almost died today.”

“Four days ago,” Shiro corrects quietly. His lips quirk in a sardonic smile at her wide-eyed expression. “You were in cryo for a while.”

Allura looks away and presses the knuckles of one hand to her lips until she can find her breath. “By my count,” she says softly, without looking at him. “I have been in cryo for the longest of any of us.”

Shiro drops onto the bed next to her, the suddenness making her bounce and look at him with wide, startled eyes before she can stop herself. “Yep.”

She’s not sure what to say to that. She’s never been the one to lay suspended and dreamless in the cryo-pods while everyone else worries and wonders if this will be the time that the miracle of Altean technology fails. The thought almost seems strange to her—a foreign entity in her own head. She almost died. So close to it that her mind shies from the thought, like a spooked prey animal from a shadow.

“Allura,” at Shiro’s soft call her gaze snaps to his as if drawn by magnets. He looks worn, frustration leaking around the edges of his expression. He quirks an odd-half smile at her. “Never thought you would be the one I’d have to have this talk with.” 

“No?” She thinks of Coran’s resigned exasperation. “Apparently, I am just as reckless as my father.”

Shiro makes a distracted note of agreement. “You do realize you are the only one who can open the wormholes, right? Without you, we only have one charge and one charge only.”

She can feel her expression go blank, lips press flat. “Are you suggesting that I remain closeted in the castle, then? Perhaps confined to the bridge and my rooms as to best protect me?”

Shiro groans and rubs the bridge of his nose with one hand. “You know I’m not.”

“Do I?” She snaps, feels the righteous rage bubble under her skin, anger coming quick and easy to her aid. “Then what, exactly, are you suggesting with that snide little reminder?” She can see the way his expression twists. She’s being unfair, knows it, but can’t seem to stop herself. “I didn’t ask to have my life force tied to the castle. I didn’t ask for it to be tied to the lions. I didn’t ask for any of this.”

“None of us did,” Shiro says, calm—so calm, the type of calm you only get when you are holding onto the fraying ends of your temper with every piece of self-control you have.

“And yet,” Allura snaps. “I don’t see you cornering _Keith_ and demanding he remain exactly where you can see him.”

Allura can _hear_ Shiro’s teeth grind as the small muscles of his jaw jump. Realization sweeps over her with an almost audible _ding!_ of epiphany. “Oh,” she breathes. “Oh, you did. That must have gone well.”

The look she gets is the most unfriendly she has ever seen on Shiro’s face. “I will not patronize you,” he says slowly, as if each collected word cost him in blood and diamonds. “And I would _greatly_ appreciate it if you extended me the same courtesy.”

She blinks at him, slow and measured, the breath she breathes out—seconds counted out slow metronome inside her head—is matched by his own even exhale. “I apologize,” she says, finds that she means it. “It was a thoughtless remark.”

Shiro studies her for a long, long moment and then sighs. She watches, mute and bemused, as he scrubs his face with one hand before letting them dangle limply between his knees. Exhaustion sits like a goblin on his shoulders, in the tired frown that etches itself into the corners of his mouth. “You know, I didn’t even think through what I was going to say to you when I came up. Only that Coran said you were awake and I was tired of waiting for you.”

“And normally we all wait together for a cryo-pod to open,” she sighs, leaning back on her hands. “But I guess Coran wanted a chance to yell at me in private?”

“Is that what he did?” Shiro asks. He laughs when she hums her agreement. “I should have guessed. That sneak. He told us it would be too overwhelming for you if we were all there.”

Allura makes a rude sound and then laughs. “Oh please. He wanted the chance to guilt trip me without an audience.” She makes a little gesture with her fingers—flicking them away as if removing dust. “He likes you all to think he’s not as manipulative as he really is.”

Shiro makes a thoughtful hum in the back of his throat before turning his head to consider her under his lashes. It’s an odd, searching look that she doesn’t quite know how to place, but it’s gone before she can really pull it apart and compare it against her internal catalogue of ‘complicated Shiro looks.’ He rolls his shoulders as if resettling a great weight. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he says after a long heartbeat. “I don’t want to fight with you. Not after,” he scrubs his face with one hand again. “Your injuries were extensive. You got them because you were separated from the team, we didn’t know you were separated, doing something reckless that we all agreed not to do because it wasn’t worth the risk. I need—”

Allura stays silent while he searches for the words. Some instinct, some hard-won sense of diplomacy, tells her that now is not the time to interject.

“I need to know where the line is,” Shiro says with a little head nod as if coming to some internal decision. “Now that you are a paladin as well as the commander of this rebellion, there needs to be a line.”

Allura cocks her head to the side while she considers that—pulls the concepts apart with mental gloves, careful and delicate. “I seem to remember hearing at on point that there was no leader in Voltron. Just five pilots all striving for the same goal—five paladins united.”

The way Shiro’s eyes light up tell her that she’s made a mistake faster than any word out of his mouth. She thinks he would be grinning at her if that wouldn’t completely destroy any serious point he’s about to make. “And yet,” he says slowly, as if putting together a complicated thought and struggling to find the right words. “And yet you decided to ignore all of us and the decision we came to as a group to go off on your own.” She sighs at the smug twinkle she can see in his eyes even though his face is so calm, so mature, such an impossible little shit. “Not particularly united.”

Allura groans low in her throat and flops over backward. “It was a mistake!” She not quite shouts. Lance’s theatrics, she thinks to herself, are starting to rub off on her. She stares up at her ceiling for a long breath before sighing. “I knew it was a mistake almost as soon as I was on the ship,” she admits. “But I thought if I was just … fast enough, clever enough, that it would work out.”

Shiro makes a thoughtful noise in the back of his throat that makes her frown in thought and drag herself upright.

“Keith said something similar, didn’t he?” She demands. 

“Not quite?” Shiro says. “But I’ve heard the justification before.” He makes a face. “More than once, actually.”

Allura laughs softly. “Poor Shiro,” she says gently with a smile to soften her teasing. “Never free of impetuous hot-heads.”

He reaches out gently knocks the knuckles of one hand against her temple, making her giggle. “It’s worse when you do it,” he says. “The rest of the team looks up to you. If they see you doing it, they’ll think it’s okay.”

She makes a soft sound as she thinks about that and then shakes her head. “I don’t think so,” she says and favors him with a rueful grin. “You weren’t around for it, but I think a lot of the shine came off me when I first started piloting Blue.”

She bites the inside of her cheek at Shiro’s subtle flinch and wishes, not for the first time and probably not for the last, that she could rewind time. The reminder of his absence and their struggles as a team is still a knife between Shiro’s ribs, she realizes too late. Still something that twists love and guilt together into a jagged blade to dig at his (frankly, ridiculously overblown) sense of responsibility. “I’m not sure of that,” Shiro says lowly. “Lan—They are all upset.”

Now its Allura’s turn to look away in guilt and pain. “He’s angry.”

“Yep,” Shiro agrees easily. “Yelled at Keith for a record 83 minutes straight. Keith timed it.”

That startles a laugh out Allura. “Please tell me that Keith didn’t actually tell Lance this?”

Shiro just grins at her.

Allura sighs, rakes her hands through her hair, but can’t keep the fond grin from spreading across her face like the dawn. “They are ridiculous,” she says.

“They are,” he agrees. “I think Lance has been saving up his yelling and it’s just all,” Shiro makes a _whoosh_ gesture, “spilling out of him now.”

“Well,” Allura says thoughtfully. “Do you think he might be able to yell Zarkon into submission?”

“It’s something we haven’t tried yet,” Shiro muses. “Maybe if we just give Lance a big enough bullhorn he can intimidate Zarkon into surrendering on the pain of being beaten with Lance’s chancla.”

Allura dissolves into sputtering giggles and buries her face in a pillow. “I don’t even know what chancla _is_ ,” she says. “But I can still see Lance’s face as he says it.”

Shiro spreads his hands to indicate something about the size of a folded staff and purses his lips in thought, brow furrowing. “It’s a type of slipper. About so big and sometimes with a wood sole.”

“Sounds very fierce,” Allura replies in mock seriousness. “I can see why they would strike fear into the heart of any oppressive dictator or brave paladin.”

“Don’t mock,” Shiro says sternly, humor lurking in the lilt of his voice, the small curl of his smile. “Lance has deadly aim and I’m sure he can dig up a chancla somewhere if given the right motivation.”

“His ability to scrounge up practically anything is a little worrying,” Allura says, momentarily distracted. “Coran swears Lance has a quartermaster’s soul and I’m not sure what that means but I don’t think it’s exactly a compliment.”

Shiro sputters out a laugh, chokes for a moment, and then dissolves into deep belly laughs. She watches and feels a curl of warmth unfurl right behind her ribs as Shiro leans back on his hands, head tipped back and laughs and laughs and laughs. The comment warrants not even an ounce of the hilarity Shiro seems to find in it, but she can recognize that bleed off of residual stress and worry and terror when she sees it. Eventually Shiro blows out a long breath and studies her like she’s a complicated bit of math to be solved. “Don’t do that again, Princess,” he says and it’s not quite an order. More like a plea dressed up as a polite request. “I don’t think any off us can quite handle it.”

She sighs and tucks feet up underneath her, studies the mess of her desk for a while before giving a little shrug. “I can promise that I’ll think about what I’ve done,” at Shiro’s frustrated groan she holds up one hand without looking at him. “It’s the promise that Coran pulled out of me. I can promise that I’ll talk to everyone, in their own time, and think about it. But I can’t make a promise I know I’ll eventually break.”

Shiro makes a noise somewhere between a huff and a groan, and Allura can’t help the small grin that creeps across her face. “Keith said something similar, didn’t he?”

“No,” Shiro says, shaking his head. “I just made him promise me the same thing Coran got out of you. Probably for the same reasons.”

“Poor Shiro,” she says again.

Shiro blows out a breath and there’s a long pause as if he’s trying to find a delicate way to phrase something complicated. “You know you would be missed if something happened to you,” he tells her lowly. “You realize that, right?”

She grabs the impulse to say ‘of course, last of my kind after all’ and kills it stillborn. She’ll blame Lance for that impulse. Instead she meets Shiro’s gaze and gives him a small half smile. Can do nothing but since she knows exactly what—or who—prompts that particular question. “Yes. There has never been any doubt in my mind.” She can’t help the little half shrug. “I just didn’t think I’d get caught.”

“Literal immortality complex,” Shiro groans. “Right.”

Allura shoves his shoulder and he swats at her one-handed. “Are we,” Allura struggles for a moment to find the right words despite all her diplomat’s training—steals instead something from Lance after a fight with Hunk. “Are we okay? Are we good?”

Shiro eyes her like he knows exactly where she stole those words from but graciously lets them go uncommented upon. “We are,” he says before heaving himself up to his feet. “Everyone else though.”

Shiro shrugs and Allura can’t help the grimace. “I have to talk to myself.”

“Yes,” he agrees as he holds out a hand to help her to her feet. “Hunk will probably just want to tell you ‘I told you so’ until the end of time. Pidge is half way through the data you brought back and hasn’t tried to taser anyone in 24 hours so it’s probably safe to talk to her. Keith,” at this Shiro grimaces, “agrees with you. And Lance, hm.”

“Should I bring a stopwatch?” Allura tries for a joke that falls flat even before its out her mouth.

“I wouldn’t,” Shiro says softly. “Go carefully there.”

Allura looks at her hands, feeling subtly chastised. “Of course.”

Shiro drops a hand on her shoulder and shakes her gently. She blinks, startled. It’s a gesture of comfort she’s seen him do a million times before. Allura can’t help the way her eyes widen, just a little, to have it turned on herself. Shiro shakes her shoulder again, carefully, like he’s afraid of jostling loose something vital. “Don’t do this again.”

Allura gives him a half-smile and a shrug. They both know her answer to that—Shiro’s long experience with Keith running as proxy data for Allura’s own reckless impulses. 

She thumps her forehead against the door after he leaves, feeling small and chastised in a way that she’s not felt since she actually _was_ small. Apparently, the thing about making life-threatening, reckless decisions is literally everyone in one’s life felt the need to point out precisely how reckless and life-threatening they were. Allura can’t find any part of it that she could disagree with—more the problem. 

Allura stares at the smooth metal of her door for a long moment as if it might suddenly present her with the solution to the mess she’s made of the team’s trust in her. 

Naturally, it does no such thing.

Pacing around her room in erratic circuits reveals no new epiphanies outside her own spiraling anxiety and stress. Fisting her hands in her hair she blows out a slow breath, counting out the seconds as the air whistles from her in a steady stream. (And there was a thing that she was never going to for granted again—the easy and painless rise and fall of her chest, the smooth functioning of her lungs.) Nothing good would come of her hiding in her room, stewing inside her own guilt and self-recriminations, and ignoring the hard work that needed to be done.

Drawing herself up in front of her door, Allura took a deep breath before pushing it open.

Stepping into the hallway felt more momentous than the occasion warranted. Not even the mice there to see her brave fording into the hallways of her own home, furtive and timid like an escaping prisoner.

She wanders with the vaguest of directions in mind, picks her way through the still and silent passages of the castle and tries not to think of when they were full of light and sudden bursts of sound. Follows some obscure internal direction until she fetches up in Hunk’s workshop like some forgotten bit of driftwood.

Allura leans against the doorjamb just to watch him work, heavy welding mask down and arms cording with the effort it took to hold industrial TIG welder. She can’t pretend to know what bit of machinery he’s pulling apart and reordering to his satisfaction, but she takes obscure comfort in watching his steady, confident movements. She smiles at the way his hair has become a wild mess, stuck to his neck and face with heat and humidity. Pulling a hair tie free from her own barely tamed mane, she raps hard against the door until the heavy hiss of the welder dies out and Hunk turns to look.

“Allura,” he says and flips his mask up, surprise written over his every feature. “Coran said you were out of the pods. Huh.”

She makes a small sound of agreement and holds out the hair tie, a pitiful peace offering, but an obvious one. “I think you might need this more than I at the moment.”

Hunk cocks his head and considers her before heaving a sigh. He pulls the mask from his head with one easy movement and shakes his head like a dog shedding water. “Thanks,” he says simply as he plucks it from her hand. “I’m not sure where all of mine have gotten to.”

“Platchu, probably,” she replies and then shrugs at his arched eyebrow. “I don’t know why he steals them, but he takes all of mine.”

“Huh,” Hunk grunts as he pulls his hair back into a messy ponytail. The look he pins her with makes her fidget. “So.”

Allura wonders if this is how he deals with a recalcitrant and misbehaving Lance, calm disapproval and silence. There’s something in his steady refusal to break the silence for her. Shiro’s stern lecture wasn’t nearly as effective in making her feel as if she’s actually done something wrong, something worth groveling for forgiveness.

“So,” she says back and squirms. She’s not sure how to start this conversation and Hunk gives no indication of having any interest in helping. Hunk crosses his arms and sighs, making her squirm harder in guilty nervousness. “I thought that maybe we should. Erm. Talk.”

Hunk gestures with one hand between them. “Behold your success. We’re talking.”

“I’m _sorry_.” The apology bursts out of her like a confession. She rubs at her chest and looks away. “I’m sorry.”

Hunk sighs again. “We all agreed,” he says, his tone plaintive and wounded. “We all agreed, so why did you go in all by yourself?”

Allura wraps her arms around herself before she can think better of it, drops them, sighs, and then wraps them around herself again. “The remote extraction would have resulted in lost data. Important lost data, necessary updates to our databases. Everything we have is so old and ou—”

“Fuck. That.”

Allura’s head jerks up as if yanked by a puppeteer’s strings. Hunk has both hands on his work bench and leans over it until he’s almost in her space. His face is set in hard, angry lines—eyebrows beetling down into a furious line, lips pressed thin. She blinks, startled and unnerved. “I beg your pardon.”

“I said: Fuck. That,” he repeats, voice as a giving as a wall of granite. 

A part of her wants to argue, knee-jerk and instinctive, but in the face of his furious rejection she finds herself stuttering and unsure. “But,” she starts.

Hunk jerks his hand through the air as if physically wiping away her reasons. “No. We talked about it. We worked all the angles. We had plans. We had even more plans. And you ignored all of them. This is about you being _fucking_ arrogant, and you know it.”

She can’t help the way her shoulders curl inward, collapsing under the pressure of his furious stare, her gaze skitters away from his. “Perhaps,” she says, chews on her lip, and then shrugs. “Perhaps.”

“Man,” Hunk sighs, more an explosion of breath than a word. “I really want to yell at you, but you do kicked puppy even better than Lance.” Allura can’t look up, can’t find it in herself to unwind from the defensive huddle she’s curled herself into. She watches his shoes come to stop in front of her and feels his heavy hands on her shoulders. Even then she refuses to look up, can’t stand seeing the hurt in his dark eyes. “You scared us, you know that, right?”

Allura nods, jerky and tense. “I know.”

“You were really hurt, Allura,” and the sound of her name on his lips drags her gaze up. Hunk quirks a half smile at her. “Like, I don’t think I’ve ever seen any of us that hurt. There was blood all over you and Keith and Blue’s cockpit and you almost died.”

He shakes her, gentle, as if—like Shiro before—he’s afraid of jostling loose something vital. “You almost _died_.”

Allura gives him her own half smile and shrugs. “I didn’t think I’d get caught.”

Hunk groans. “Now there’s two of you,” he grumbles. “This is the worst.”

“I’m not as bad as Keith,” she protests and smiles sweetly. 

“The worst,” he repeats.

Allura cocks her head to the side, a smile tugging at the edges of her mouth and she pokes him, just a little. When he grabs her hand, she gives him another little shrug. “I’m not nearly as bad as Keith,” she repeats. “You know I’m not.”

Hunk gives her a narrow-eyed look that makes her catch her bottom lip between her teeth to keep from grinning. “I’m pretty sure I know no such thing. I think you two are exactly as bad. I think you are going to give Shiro more white hair. I think Lance is going to yell himself into permanent muteness. I think the two of you should never be allowed to go on a mission together ever.”

Allura bites her lips to keep from giggling, unsure of where the line is, and gives him that little shrug again. If her eyes burn, well, Hunk is gracious enough not to say anything. She’s an odd mix of chastised and glowing with warmth. Every piece of her lit from within by a gentle fire of affection and care.

“Aw, Princess,” he sighs and hauls her into a hug that lifts her off her feet. “You scared me so bad. So bad. I need you to never do that again. You know how I am with stress.”

She squirms in his hold and he retaliates by squeezing harder until all the air bursts out of her lungs in a sudden rush and a, quite frankly, pathetic squeak. He ruffles her hair, making her squawk with indignation and swat at his hands, when he drops her back on her feet. He runs his hand through her hair again, softly, as if checking for injury and she tips her head into it just a little. 

Hunk’s expression crumples, taking her heart with it. “You were so hurt, Allura. We can’t take that. Don’t ask us to.”

That makes something hard and defensive thrum under her skin for all she wants to take the pain out of the curled set of Hunk’s shoulders, the unhappy twist of his lips. She tucks her hands under her arms and looks away. “We are all paladins,” she says, voice harder than she’d like it. “Getting hurt is something that we all must be prepared for. I can’t be—” she swipes at her face, irritated by the burn in her eyes. “I can’t hide in the castle and not _do_ anything.”

Hunk sweeps her into another backbreaking hug, pressing his cheek to the top of her hair. “Okay. First, that entire line of thought is stupid and if I hear you say anything like it again I’m going to shoot you with the foam darts I use on Lance.” Allura blinks at the sudden flood of words and tries to squirm away, feeling overwhelmed and exposed all at once. Hunk tightens his grip and lifts her clear off her feet in response. “Second, even when you weren’t piloting Blue you were so, so important and honestly so reckless it stopped my heart every other day.” He pulls back to wave a finger at her face, so close she goes slightly cross-eyed to watch it. “That entire stunt with the skimmer on the Balmera? Charging Haggar? Everything with the everything and the teleduv? I mean. _Eurgh_.”

Allura cocks her head to the side as Hunk devolves briefly into outraged noises while he shakes her, still so gentle, by her shoulders. “This reckless thing? Yeah. No. Stop it.”

She pulls back enough so she can grab his wildly gesturing hand and pull it to rest, presses her lips to his scarred and burned knuckles. She gives him a faint rueful smile as all the words die in his throat at the simple gesture and he frowns at her. “I can only promise to try,” she tells him. “I can only try.”

“Because if you see an opportunity you are going to take it,” Hunk sighs. “Seriously, Pidge and I need to get to work on those tracking collars.”

Allura makes a face. “Please don’t.”

“Don’t do things that make me wish we had collars on you!” Hunk retorts, looking both flustered and outraged. He pauses for a moment and then pulls a face. “Never ever tell Lance that I said that.”

She blinks. “Why?”

Hunk scrubs his face with both hands. “I am not explaining any of that to a princess, oh my god.” The thoughtful expression he gets after a moment has an alarmingly mischievous cast to it. “No wait. Ask that question of Lance. Preferably some place I can film it for posterity.”

There are a great, great many things that Allura does not understand about her paladins, and the dynamics of Hunk and Lance’s friendship continued to rank high among them. She gives Hunk a bemused smile. “If you wish?”

He claps her on the shoulder. “If you do this for me,” he says, low and reverent. “It will be the greatest day of my _life_.”

Allura can only stare at him for a long moment, torn between incredulity and amusement. Humor wins out and she bursts into giggles. Hunk smiles at her and then taps her chin with one loose fist. “But seriously, stop it with this reckless thing. I’m not good with stress and one day,” he taps a light fist over his heart before spreading his fingers in pantomime of an explosion. “Boom, you’re gonna give me a heart attack for real. How would you feel about that? You’d feel terrible, so stop it.”

She shrugs again and puts her hand over the one he still has on her shoulder. “Are we good?” She asks, steals Lance’s words yet again. It’s an almost childish way of asking if the crisis has past, but elegant in its innocent simplicity. “Are we okay?”

Hunk sighs so deeply it moves her hair across her cheek just a little. He squeezes her shoulder gently. “We’re good,” he says. “For now, at least, but if you do this again,” he wags a finger at her and Allura shoots him what she hopes is a chastised look from under her lashes. Hunk shakes his head. “You’ll be unrepentant as you are now, and we’ll have this whole argument again, but yeah. We’re good.”

Allura leans against his work bench when he finally releases her. She feels suddenly weak on her feet, dizzy, but with a great lightness under her breastbone. She braces herself with both hands and breathes out, counting the ticks as the air moves through her lungs. There’s a burn in her ribs, making her breath catch low in her throat, stuttering out harshly. For a moment, her leg buckles underneath her and she catches herself hard on the bench. Hunk rubs a hand up and down her back, slow and careful, moving with her every breath.

“Didn’t realize this had you so stressed,” he says, voice soft.

Allura can only close her eyes against the sudden press of tears and nod. Left over anxiety from nearly dying, she thinks. Misfunctioning of the superior parietal lobe, she thinks. Failure of the precuneus to communicate properly with the posterior cingulate gyrus, she thinks. 

Flashback.

She squeezes her eyes shut until the white and magenta explosions she sees are merely the after images burned across her eyelids. Hunk stands next to her, hand still moving in circuits up and down her back, heavy and grounding. 

“I’m okay,” she says and is enormously proud when her voice doesn’t shake. She stands up straight and squares her shoulders back. Phantom pain tries to double her over and she closes her eyes against it, wraps her hand around Hunk’s wrist and holds on until the feeling fades. Holds onto him until she’s standing braced and firm.

When she looks at him, he just raises one dark eyebrow. “Still sure that going onto that cruiser all on your own was a good idea?”

“No,” she says and smiles. “It was a terrible idea, thought up by a lunatic and I disavow any knowledge of it and furthermore: fuck you.”

Hunk laughs and punches her shoulder lightly. “We’re corrupting you,” he says and sounds oddly smug at the idea. “I should probably apologize for that to someone, but hearing you say: ‘fuck you’ in that posh accent is one of the best things about this mess.”

Allura grins again, so wide her cheeks hurt. “Fuck you.”

///

She eventually leaves Hunk to his welding and his controlled destruction (“It’s therapeutic, Princess” he says when she asks. “Setting things on fire is therapeutic.”) and finds herself adrift in the bowels of her castle yet again. Allura considers, briefly, going to the observation decks. She knows Lance will be there—knees drawn up to his chin, watching a tiny blue planet spin in endless orbit—but she hasn’t got the confidence to face him. Not quite yet.

So, she makes her way, silent as a ghost in the memory of her own home, through the labyrinth of service hallways and access ducts until she finds herself standing at the edge of Pidge’s domain.

“I’m still mad at you,” Pidge says before Allura can even draw breath to announce her presence. “I’m gonna be mad at you for a while.”

“Even if I apologize?” Allura asks. She’s not offended. Pidge’s blunt, almost painful, way of bulldozing through any sort of awkward social situation has become an asset all in its own right.

Pidge twists in her seat to stare hard at Allura for several long breaths and it takes all of Allura’s etiquette training not to squirm under that ferocious glower. “That might help. No bets though.”

“I am sorry,” Allura says and delicately picks her way to Pidge’s chair. She can’t pretend she understands any of the scrolling data that fills the screen of her laptop, but she studies it intently anyway. “I’m sorry I made you … well. I’m sorry.”

Pidge grunts and types a few more lines of code before running both hands through her hair. “Okay,” she says, spits, really. “Okay. So, the boys are fucking dumb, right? We both know this? They are dumb and reckless, and I go insane trying to figure out how to, you know, idiot proof our missions. But I do pretty good on that, because I know all the different flavors of stupid Lance can trot out on any given time. But you!” Pidge whirls to stab a finger at Allura. “You!” She tears her hands through her hair again. A jerky, vicious gesture born of more emotion than can get out her mouth. “I can’t have you running around like an idiot.”

Allura gently untangles Pidge’s hands from where they have fisted in her hair and smooths her fingers flat before tangling with her own. “I’m sorry,” she repeats. “I am.”

“I didn’t think you were this flavor of stupid,” Pidge says and there’s a gleam tears in her eyes that catches the light from the screen glare of her laptop. “I thought—I,” Pidge scrubs her face with one hand. “I thought you were smarter than that.”

Allura contemplates her tiniest paladin for a moment. Pidge won’t meet her gaze, still half turned away from her so she glares instead at her laptop and its endlessly scrolling numbers. Allura wraps her fingers around one fine-boned wrists and heaves, levers Pidge right out of her seat so she’s stumbling into Allura’s awkward embrace.

Pidge goes very, very still. 

“I’m sorry,” Allura repeats. It’s her favorite phrase for the day. It’ll probably be her favorite phrase for the week. She smooths her fingers through Pidge’s wild mess of a mane, carefully finger combing out the terrible tangles she finds there. A hard tremble runs all the way up Pidge’s spine. “Will you forgive me?”

Pidge shifts until she’s got her face pressed against Allura’s sternum. Her arms go around Allura like slender steel bars. They both ignore the way Pidge’s breath hitches, wet and raspy, as they stand together in the low gloom of Pidge’s workspace. 

“I knew you were gonna do it, you know?” Pidge says, voice muffled. “I could see the way you didn’t agree with Shiro. I could see it in the way you set your shoulders and smiled your princess smile and I _knew_ that you were gonna do it.”

Allura says nothing. Cards her fingers through Pidge’s hair, far softer than she’d ever expected and waits.

“But I didn’t want to think you’d be that stupid. That you’d—” Pidge’s voice breaks and Allura thinks of how very young her Green paladin is. How young they all are, but Pidge in all her ferocious, prodigious intelligence and focus especially. Pidge presses her forehead harder against Allura for a moment. “I’m not gonna make that mistake again.”

Allura nods distractedly for all that Pidge couldn’t see it. She stares at the fall wall of Green’s hangers and doesn’t see it. “It was arrogant of me,” she admits, perhaps for the first time. “It was arrogant,” she decides. “I couldn’t let the opportunity pass without trying and I thought— Well. Doesn’t matter.”

Pidge pulls back so she can study Allura thoughtfully, like she would a bit of glitching code. “You thought?”

Allura rubs the bridge of her nose for a moment and can’t met her paladin’s eyes. “I thought that,” Allura says before stopping with a frown. “No, I felt like it was something that I had to do.”

“Why?” Pidge asks. Simple. Innocent. So very hard to answer.

Allura frowns as she stares off in the distance over Pidge’s head, finds her fingers repeatedly petting through the soft hair at Pidge’s nape. “For so long I have been sheltered,” she says slowly as if tasting each word for the truth of them. “I have been protected by my father, by Coran, by all of you.”

Pidge opens her mouth to disagree and Allura tugs the fine hair at Pidge’s nape lightly in warning.

“Hush,” she murmurs. Overkill, at this point, she realizes since Pidge has gone still and pliant in her arms. “I hated more than I could bear the way all of you would risk yourselves, risk everything, and I sat safe and secure in the castle.”

Pidge snorts and presses herself against Allura—an enormous presence for such a tiny body. “Right, sure. ‘Safe and secure’ except for the entire ‘goes charging out to fight the entire Galra army, lion be damned’ thing. Sure.”

Allura tugs at her hair again, mouth twisted in a moue of displeasure, but something warm and selfishly delighted curls in her belly. “I didn’t say it was rational.”

“Obviously.” Pidge’s voice is dry as any desert on Arrakis 5.

“I can only apologize so many times,” she says.

Pidge pulls away from her, stomps a few furious steps away from her before spinning back to pin her with a hard stare. “I don’t want your apologies,” she says. “I want you to not do this again.”

Allura smiles, cocks her head to one side, and says nothing.

“Ugh,” says Pidge before she drops back into her seat before her computer—her throne for all it’s a battered chair that’s seen wildly better days—and picks up typing as if nothing has happened. “Ugh.”

Allura folds her arms along the back of Pidge’s chair and rests her cheek against the crown of Pidge’s head. “Do you forgive me?”

“Are you stupid,” Pidge asks without looking back at her. “Don’t fish.”

Allura stretches one hand to run a finger down the screen of Pidge’s laptop just to hear her grumble in irritation. “Do you forgive me,” she repeats. “I think I need to hear it.”

“Of all the fucking stupid—” Pidge’s angry mutter dies in her throat. “Of course, I forgive you. Don’t want you to do it again, but yeah, I get it.”

Allura smiles and drops her arm across Pidge’s shoulders, pinning her back against her chair. She leans forward to press her forehead against Pidge’s shoulder, her hair spilling like a cloud over Pidge’s chest much to her grumbled frustration. “I didn’t think I’d get caught,” Allura admits. “I didn’t think anyone would notice.”

“You didn’t _think_ ,” Pidge snaps. “You can stop right at that.”

“We still got the data though,” Allura says without raising her head from Pidge’s shoulder.

Pidge makes an inarticulate sound of frustration. “You know we could have gotten that data in other ways, right?”

Allura shrugs, trusting that Pidge will feel the gesture even if she doesn’t see it.

Pidge makes a disgusted noise in the back of her throat. “Arrogance, that’s what this is. Just unmitigated arrogance.”

But her hand moves through the waterfall of Allura’s hair that spills down her chest, fingers combing through tresses with a gentleness one would not think possible given her sharp tone and caustic observations. And that, Allura thinks to herself, is her Green paladin all over—hiding a sensitive heart under sarcasm and her own burning brilliance.

Allura shifts so she can press her cheek against the top of Pidge’s head, ignoring the way it makes Pidge grumble about her hair being all over the place, and lets herself drift for a moment. She listens to Pidge’s fingers move quick and sure across her keyboard, the sound only broken by Pidge’s occasional frustrated groan as some bit of code doesn’t work the way she wishes.

“I wanted a sister,” Allura says apropos nothing. “Did I ever tell you that?”

Pidge goes still and careful, says nothing as Allura stretches her arms out in front of them to stare at the bitten ends of her fingernails. “I used to ask my parents constantly,” Allura continues, turns their joined hands one way and then another. “I’m certain it was obnoxious.”

Pidge makes an inarticulate noise of interest.

“And then there was Zarkon’s betrayal, and the war, and my father shoving me into that technological horror show of a coffin,” Allura bites off that sentence hard, forces the bitterness out of her tone and tries to remember where she was going. “And then,” she tilts her head until she can press her cheek more firmly against the top of Pidge’s head. “And then I woke up. And there you were.”

“I said I was a boy when you first met me,” Pidge says, amusement heavy in her tone.

Allura catches her hands where they dance across the keyboard and tangles Pidge’s delicate fingers in hers. “You were a terrible liar,” Allura replies and then laughs softly at Pidge’s grunt of annoyance. “It was so obvious that you were upset, that something was off, that it didn’t take long to figure it out.”

“And you were so subtle about bring it up,” Pidge says, caustic and affectionate all at once.

Allura makes a disgusted noise in the back of her throat. “I had been asleep for ten thousand years and besides diplomacy never came naturally to me.”

That seems to throw Pidge for a moment. “It doesn’t? But you always make such a big deal about Alteans being the diplomats of the universe.”

Allura turns their joined hands one way and then another, admiring the way light from Pidge’s laptop tosses odd shadows across their knuckles. She makes a low thoughtful sound in the back of her throat. “And so we were supposed to be,” she admits. “Technologically superior to the point of arrogance, so certain that our alchemy and our sciences could solve any problem, we thought that not only were we invincible, but infallible. And look where that got us.”

“Little dark there, Princess,” Pidge mutters, low enough that Allura isn’t sure she’s supposed to have heard it. She shifts slightly in the impromptu cage of Allura’s arms and tugs her fingers free from Allura’s so she can catch Allura’s wrists and pull her arms down across her shoulders. “So why are you being all dark and morbid? That’s generally Shiro’s thing—you’re normally off trying to force the universe to your liking through sheer, stubborn optimism.”

Allura laughs and then tucks her head down so she can press her face into Pidge’s tangled mane. “I don’t know,” she admits quietly. “I nearly died? I hear that makes one prone to dark thoughts.”

Pidge keep one hand wrapped around Allura’s wrists, pressing them against the space below the hollow of her throat so Allura can feel the vibration of every word she speaks. “I’ve seen you be perky and peppy only hours after major fleet battles, minutes after pulling all our asses out of the fire, so yeah not exactly buying that one.”

“I made a mistake, one that nearly got me killed—and did get me scolded, lectured, or just yelled at by three of my paladins and I haven’t even talked to Lance,” Allura says and then shrugs. “I don’t know. It makes one introspective, I think, to fail so catastrophically.”

Pidge makes a non-committal sound in the back of her throat. “Not that much of a failure, really, since you did get all the data.”

Allura makes an incoherent but intensely disgusted noise. “Was it worth it though?” She makes a short, choppy hand gesture. “Not my injuries, as those were easily healed with a quick trip to the pods, but the mess I’ve made of the team’s trust in me.”

“I’m going to point out that there was nothing simple about your injuries,” Pidge says, rebuke making her tone sharp enough to slice the thin edge of a hair. “And it’s not like being in the pods is easy for you, so don’t try to minimize _that_.” Allura has the sudden, startlingly memory of slow tears sliding down her Green paladin’s cheeks as she pressed her hand, fingertips to fingertips, palms to palms, separated by the thinnest layer of aluminosilicate, and feels overwhelmingly like an _ass_. “But you haven’t made a mess of our trust—I mean, Hunk will probably try to stick a tracking bracelet or something on you—but we trust Keith just fine and he pulls this sort of thing all the time.”

Pidge shrugs. “It wasn’t a failure, but if you do it again, I’ll shake you until your teeth rattle out.”

Allura can’t help the laugh that sputters out of her. “Well, then.”

“The data is good,” Pidge says. “I’m not sure I should tell you that, since you’ll just use it as an excuse to go be crazy and idiotic again, but the data you pulled from that cruiser? Yeah, this with the stuff that the Blades have been collecting gives us a _way_ better idea of what they are using this refined quintessence for.”

That catches Allura’s attention, she curls over Pidge’s shoulder, leaning forward to peer at the laptop’s tiny screen. “And what were they using it for?” She scans through the data, engineering plans and alchemical formulas blending together to form a horrifying picture. “Wait, is this what I think it is? They’re trying to use quintessence to stabilize the scalar fields of their propulsion drives to actually use tachyon condensation as some sort of, of, of _accelerant_?”

Pidge shoves Allura’s hair back into her own face. “Hold your mane, I can’t breathe with it all over my face. But yeah, they think that they can use quintessence to solve the Cauchy problem by using quintessence as a boundary condition and thus resolve the quantum collapse issue.”

Allura reaches around Pidge to scroll down, humming low and thoughtful in the back of her throat. “Basics of Altean alchemical causation theorems already demonstrate that quintessence cannot not be used as a mass effect field boundary—that’s, that’s what opened the rift!”

“Yep,” Pidge says, making the ‘p’ pop, loud and horrid. “Grand, ain’t it?”

“This is an abomination!” Allura can only stare in mute, flabbergasted horror.

“Yep,” Pidge says again. “So, on the one hand I really hate what you did. Like, there are no words for how much I hate that you nearly got yourself killed. But on the other hand? This is data that was worth it. Holy shit.”

How long they stay there staring at the data in all of its awful implications, Allura can’t say. Pidge slowly tips her head until it presses against Allura’s arm and then sighs, slow and shuddering. “Have you told anyone yet,” Allura asks quietly. In the dark and staticky silence of Pidge’s workshop she can almost believe that this is a thing they could keep secret. Almost. “Because we will need to tell the rest of the team.”

Pidge shudders out another sigh. “No,” she admits softly. “I didn’t know how.”

Allura nods as she pulls back. She can feel the pieces of her persona slotting back together, feel it in the way her spine goes straight, her shoulders go back. “I will tell them,” she decides. “And then we will call a meeting with our allies to determine how we should proceed.”

“There you are,” Pidge says nonsensically and only smiles when Allura raises an eyebrow. “Doesn’t take you long to find your feet again, does it?”

Allura blinks at her and then shrugs. “Neither the universe nor the war will wait for me to have a little mental breakdown, so yes?”

Pidge tips her head back against her chair to stare up at the ceiling as if it held the answers of the universe. “I feel like I should have something deep and meaningful to say about that,” she says quietly without looking at Allura. “I feel like I should have words or something to tell you that you don’t need to be—” Pidge waves her hand in the air in a vague manner “—The Princess and Commander, you know? But I don’t.”

Allura runs a gentle hand through Pidge’s wild hair. “You don’t need to.”

“I know _that_ ,” Pidge says tartly. “Doesn’t mean I don’t want to.”

And that’s a thing that Allura doesn’t know how to deal with—Pidge approaches social interactions as if each one’s primed to explode or otherwise maul her, and here she was wishing she had the right words. Allura grinds the palm of her hand into her breastbone as if that would relieve the sudden ache that bloomed behind it. “I’m not sure what to say to that,” she says softly.

Pidge shoots her a sideways glance before going back to glaring at her computer screen. “’Thank you’ is the standard response when someone expresses concern.” She makes another vague hand gesture. “Or so I’m told.”

Allura folds herself around Pidge’s chair so she can drape her arms around her paladin’s neck like a loose scarf and let her hair fall like waterfall over Pidge’s chest to her grumbled complaints. “Thank you,” she says with her face hidden in Pidge’s wild mane. “Thank you.”

Pidge grunts, the sound somewhere between affectionate and annoyed, and pats Allura’s head.

///

It takes Allura more time than she’d like to admit to pry herself out of Pidge’s domain—it’s quiet, the silence unbroken except by Pidge’s lightning key strikes and her occasional thoughtful grunt, comfortably gloomy, lit only by Pidge’s laptop screens and whatever other devices she deems necessary, and no one dares enter her domain except by invitation. But it feels too close to hiding for Allura to remain there for long, not when there’s things that demand doing and she knows it’s her duty to do them. She untangles herself eventually, asks for a copy of the data files Pidge has already cleaned up and translated into something understandable to other sentient beings of, perhaps, not-quite-terrifyingly-genius standards of intelligence, and sees herself out with as little fanfare as she entered.

She plays with the data, mostly moving it around into a presentation that will hold the sometimes distressingly short attention spans of her paladins. (everyone likes to lay that Lance’s feet, but Allura has found that Keith tends to be the one wander if a presentation trends to close to theoretical and doesn’t have enough action items. Explode-y bits preferred.) Her feet take her on autopilot through the halls as she shifts things around on her tablet. 

Allura is almost— _almost_ —surprised when she finds herself on the threshold of the observation decks. Her hand hovers in mid-gesture before the door, arrested in the sweep that will send the doors spilling open. She’s not sure she’s ready to confront Lance and all of his righteous rage. She has no good arguments for any of his approbation, no defenses against his fury, and so she stands unsure and unsteady on the threshold.

Drawing in a breath that shakes only a little she brings her hand down against the locking mechanism and breathes out, slow and steady, as the doors sweep open.

Only the figure that slowly unfurls against the artificial back drop of stars and the infinite expanse of the universe is not Lance’s lanky form. Keith leans back on his hands, cocking his head to one side. It’s odd, now, to see him out of his Blade uniform and he looks unusually casual—comfortable in ways she’d never thought to associate with him.

“He’s not here,” Keith says without preamble. “Saw me in here, yelled a for a while and stomped out.”

Allura’s grateful for the way he says nothing about the way she wobbles her way over to him, suddenly weak-kneed with relief, and drops into a graceless sprawl next to him. “Longer than 83 minutes?” she asks.

“I didn’t time it, this time,” Keith answers and quirks a tiny half smile. “Shiro’s telling tales.”

“As if he wouldn’t sell you out second it looked like it would give him the high ground,” Allura snarks back.

Keith bumps her with his shoulder, gentle and cautious. “You’ve got me confused for you,” he says with a wider grin. “He loves me.”

Allura folds her arms around knees and rests her cheek against them to regard him steadily until he fidgets and looks away. “He does,” she agrees after a time. “Which is why you upset him so much.”

Keith makes a noise caught between annoyance and frustration low in his throat. “You upset him just as much.”

“Because I’m the only one who can open wormholes,” Allura returns with a half-smile. “Coran and I haven’t quite figured out how to store enough quintessence for him to handle more than one jump on his own.”

Keith’s expression goes dark. “You don’t think that’s the reason, do you?”

Allura laughs. “You can’t tell me it’s not. Like that isn’t the reason you went tearing around an imploding cruiser.”

Keith’s expression crumples as he looks away from her, staring hard at the empty space where Altea once hung. “You matter for more reasons than just wormholes.”

“Well,” Allura says, amusement heavy in her tone. “I also pilot the Blue lion, at least until you decide to come home.”

“You’re more than just a pilot,” Keith snaps.

“Oh, I know,” Allura sighs. “I’m the chosen Altean, the princess of a dead race, the beacon of all who would be free, the one connected to all the lions, the _in nominae_ Commander of the resistance. Did I miss any? Trust me I am aware of my symbolic status.”

Keith makes an indecipherable noise in the back of his throat. “If you know all that then why …?”

His voice trails off and he makes an abortive gesture with his hands before glowering at her.

She cocks her head slowly to one side. “Don’t you ever get tired of being the shiny symbol everyone flocks to?”

The look Keith gives her is so baffled that she has to bite her lip against laughing at him. “What?”

Allura waves a hand at herself and then sighs. “I’m aware of the symbol I present. I would have to be an idiot not to after how many times it’s been dropped on my head. But that’s not exactly me, now is it?”

Keith just stares at her as if she’s an equation that refuses to solve correctly, “What?”

Allura spreads her fingers in front of her before locking them together and rocking backwards slightly. “I always knew I would be a symbol. You don’t grow up a princess and not have that beaten into your head every hour of every day. ‘Stand up straight,’ ‘don’t rush,’ ‘be careful with your words,’” she repeats, stretching her fingers out before curling back into a ball. “I’ve always known.”

He doesn’t say anything, just watches her with that solemn expression that she’s learned means he doesn’t quite know what to do and doesn’t trust any of his first impulses.

She shrugs and looks away. “It’s all right,” she says. “It’s what I was trained to be.” She quirks her own half-smile. “Born and bred for it, really, the ‘chosen,’”—she can’t help the sarcastic little air quotes, an affectation Allura is pretty sure she’s picked up from Lance— “Did I ever tell you that my parents’ marriage was arranged to bring the gene back into the royal line? Trust when I say that I’ve never had that many illusions about who or what I am, or the role I have to play.”

When Allura laughs into her knees Keith says nothing. Eventually Allura sighs, drained by the sudden emotions and props her chin on her knees to watch the spinning simulacra of long dead constellations go whirling past. 

She’s not sure how long they sit there. Once the silence might have been companionable, but neither one of them deals particularly well with intense emotions and she’s just unloaded probably more than Keith’s allotted ability to deal with emotional bullshit for the next decafeeb. Eventually Keith huffs out a noise caught between a snarl and sigh, rakes his hands through his hair once, twice, thrice and then hauls himself up to his feet.

“Stay here,” he says, less a command and more an open plea. “Just. Stay.”

Allura watches with a sense of surreal bemusement as he all but runs from the observation deck. “I’m not a yupper,” she calls after him. 

She thinks about leaving out of a sense of obstinance and spite, but Keith rarely asks for anything, much less anything from her, so she settles in to wait. 

Nothing, however, makes time drag on quite like being told to stay in one place and wait and Allura finds herself flipping through various programs the observation deck possessed, switching from one long dead star system to another without rhyme or reason. Switching through them simply for the novelty of watching the hologram shift.

“Huh,” says Lance, startling her out of near-meditative state she’d slipped into. “You’re actually still here.”

Her breath catches in her throat to look at him, backlit by the hallway lights so she can’t quite make out his expression, so she shrugs rather than answering. They stare at each other for a long moment, tension drawing tight and uncomfortable between them until Allura can stand it no longer. She curls tighter around her knees and stares hard at the holo-display of some star system she’s never even heard the name of. “Are you still angry with me?” She asks. “You wouldn’t be the only one.”

“You spooked Keith into finding me,” Lance says instead of answering her. “You know how he is about feelings, you really should give the guy a break.”

His non-answer is as much an answer as a direct response. Allura presses her forehead to her knees and makes a non-committal noise. She doesn’t look up even when he drops heavily into a sprawl next to her. Can’t even find it in her to steal a glance at him from the corners of her eyes. Remains instead with her face stubbornly smashed against her bent knees, hands wrapped around them, until a gentle touch on her back startles her into unfurling.

Lance arches an eyebrow at her. “Would you be happier,” he asks carefully. “If I were angry with you? Would that assuage your ridiculous martyr complex?”

“I don’t have a martyr complex,” she snaps and then colours when he laughs at her. She fluffs her hair back from her shoulders without looking at him. “I am merely aware of my duties.”

“Uh-huh,” Lance says and leans back on his hands, head tipped to one side and a lazy smile curling at the edges of his lips. “And Shiro’s just very conscientious, absolutely does not have the most ridiculously overblown sense of responsibility in any three star systems you care to name.”

Allura makes a disgusted noise and glowers at him. 

“I am, you know,” he says apropos nothing. “Angry with you that is. I’m so fucking angry I can’t see straight, and I don’t even know what words to use to describe it.”

Allura can’t help the way she curls in on herself. “Oh.”

He heaves out a huge sigh that rattles out of him like an ancient engine. “I bet you already talked to Hunk, because he’s fundamentally a sweetheart and can’t stand to be angry at anyone he loves for longer than an hour—not that I have tested this theory, mind you. And Pidge hasn’t tasered anyone or tried to short out an essential system to route power to her decryption servers, so you probably talked to her. Keith found me in, to be totally honest, the most hilarious panic ever. So, you are 3 for 5 paladins, not including me, by my count.”

Allura blinks at the flood of words, feeling tossed this way and that, upside down and tumbled over. “Shiro came to my rooms almost as soon as I was out of the pods.”

“He works fast,” Lance says and there’s something in his tone that she doesn’t quite understand. “And Coran was there when you first got out so he could get first crack at guilt-tripping you.” He gives her a one-hand finger gun, the gesture oddly muted and sarcastic. “Am I wrong?”

“He likes to think he’s sneaky,” she says and feels as if she’s standing on a bog, no safe footing for miles around.

Lance barks out a harsh laugh and shakes his head. “Yeaaaah. No. I’ve been conned into cleaning the healing pods one too many times to buy that bullshit.” The look he turns on her is an odd mix of disdainful and sad. She finds she can’t bear it for long, finds meeting that dissecting stare makes her feel more vulnerable and exposed than even sitting in Blue’s cockpit for the first time and _begging_ for the lion to listen to her. “So, I’m the last, huh?”

Allura finds herself tangling her fingers together, wringing them, obsessively, watching that rather than meeting his eyes. “I didn’t know how to approach you.”

Lance grunts. “You could always start with an apology for your dumb bullshit,” he says. “I hear that’s a good ice breaker when you’ve fucked up.”

“I’m sorry,” she says to her knees.

“Yeaaah,” Lance sighs more than says. “Want to try saying that to my face? Might make it a little bit more believable.”

Allura can’t help her slight flinch. She looks up at him and then away, not able to withstand what she might see there. She flinches again when he reaches out and pulls her around to face her with two soft fingers on her jaw. The touch is feather-light, nothing more than a suggestion, but she follows it as if pulled by electro-magnetic currents. 

“Try again,” he says.

Allura feels trapped by his gaze, pinned by a force she can scarce name or understand. “I’m sorry,” she repeats and then gives him a self-deprecating smile. “I didn’t think I would get caught?”

Lance frowns at her, lips pulling into a sideways scowl of disapproval. “You cannot possibly be that stupid.”

She shrugs. “I’m very fast and we had the architectural plans of the cruiser from the Blades. I thought,” she waves one hand vaguely, “I don’t know. I thought I could get it done quickly enough no one would notice.”

“Of all the reckless, stupid,” Lance’s voice peters off into incoherent sputtering. She watches him from the corners of her eyes as he sputters for a moment longer, barks out something harsh in a language she doesn’t understand, and shakes his head. “Maybe we should send you to the Blade for training, they’ve done such a great job beating some form of patience into Keith’s stubborn head.”

Allura blinks. “I am almost completely certain it doesn’t work like that.”

Lance shrugs one shoulder. “Have you tried? No? Maybe it does. Maybe we should ask. You know, just call up Kolivan and be like: ‘Hi, yeah, Kolivan? Look, love the work you did with Keith, he’s like a real boy and everything now, think you could repeat the magic with other dumbass baby paladins that refuse to play well with others?’” Lance mimes the entire phone call one-handed and then shrugs. “They could be a finishing school for paladins. Teach baby paladins manners, etiquette—you know, assassinations only before noon, use the left blade for commanders, the right one for mere mooks and second call sign, not the first, for fancy dress occasions—and how to actually fucking communicate with their goddammned motherfucking teams. Like, no dumbass baby paladin, you do not get to go running around a Galra battle cruiser of questionable design without sending out written invitations to the rest of your team. D-, see me after class.”

They blink at each other for a moment and Lance grimaces slightly. “I think that metaphor got away from me,” he admits. “But you get my point.”

“Actually,” Allura says, finding herself so close to laughter she’s amazed. “I’m afraid I don’t.”

Lance rolls his eyes at her so hard he uses his entire body. “ _Ugh_ ,” he says with feeling. “Some days I really don’t understand why I— Yeah, no, not going down that conversational pathway when I’ve had less than ten hours of sleep in a seventy-two hour window. Note—” he waves a finger in Allura’s face “—that I am blaming you for that, by the way. I swear between you and Keith the universe is trying to tell me something and I think that something is that I am either doomed to babysit until I die of a catastrophic stroke brought on my ambient stress levels or that I am a colossal, hypocritical idiot and honestly its even fucking odds for either thing.”

“Um,” says Allura, feeling that this is the only reasonable response to the onslaught of words that make less sense than Slav’s more recent rant about alternative realities and causal pathways.

Lance grinds the palms of both hands into his forehead and breathes out a heavy, open-mouthed sigh. Then he leans back, face tipped to the ceiling, eyes closed as if in benediction and draws in a deep breath that visibly expands his chest with each second. “Okay,” he says slowly. “Okay. Okay. I am sleep-deprived, still pissed though if you asked me exactly why I wouldn’t be able to tell you, feeling deeply weird because Keith came and got _me_ to deal with _you_ and like fuck I know what to make of _that_ , and honestly I just want things to go back to normal.” He pauses to scowl. “Or as normal as fighting an inter-galactic evil empire of purple, giant chinchillas can be. Fuck my life.”

“Um?” Allura repeats, feeling that this will be about as successful conversational salvo as her first attempt.

“Ugh,” Lance says again and collapses inward like a star after super-nova—all parts of him folding inward. 

Tentatively, as if approaching a feral yupper, Allura reaches out to pat his shoulder. When he doesn’t explode in another torrent of words that leaves her stunned and stuttering she runs her hand down his back, from his shoulder down the ridge of his spine to his hip and back up. Lance drags in a shivering breath, tenses, and then goes limp against his knees. 

“I’m sorry,” she says because she doesn’t know what else to say. Because she feels like it’s the only thing that could be said into the sudden stillness that follows his storm of words. Because she is. 

“Don’t fucking do that that again,” he says against his knees. She notes distantly that they’ve traded positions. She’s sprawled out, braced on one hand with the other making lazy circuits up and down his back while he’s curled around his bent knees refusing to look at her. “I don’t think I’ve been more terrified in my entire _life_.”

Allura sighs and considers all of the responses she’s given to that request in the past twenty-four hours and find each of them lacking. “I won’t,” she says and blinks when he tilts his head against his knees to look at her. “Or, well, I’ll tell you first?”

She winces slightly at how awkward she sounds, so unsure, but he smiles at her. It’s tiny and pained at the edges, but it’s real. “I’ll take it,” he says. “If you are going to go off and be fucking stupid and suicidal, at least tell me first. I’ll go with you.”

Allura makes a wounded sound, something low and feral in the back of her throat at that idea. Something completely reflexive, instinctive, at the very concept—a complete rejection before she can even form the words to argue.

He grins at her, fatalistic and mirthless. “And she starts to get it.”

“That,” she says carefully, as if feeling her way around slowly cracking ice. “Is a particularly cruel way of making the point.”

“Is it?” Lance asks, tone thoughtful and distant. “ _Huh_.”

And that’s a thing she doesn’t know how to decipher. It’s a thing she’s not sure she can stand to decipher. She has a sixth sense that they stand upon the precipice of something great and terrible and infinitely beautiful that will leave them both a lovely wreckage. It’s like the little feral warning bells that go off when one gets too close to a fire. _Warning: for all this is gorgeous it will leave you a charred cinder, do not touch_.

She wonders if he hears those bells as well as he watches her out of half-lidded eyes, gaze dark and inscrutable. 

Allura rubs her eyes, grinds the heels of her palms into them until she sees blooming flowers of pink and magenta behind her eyelids. When she drops her hands, she finds Lance watching her, still and silent in ways that she’d never though possible of him when the first met. Something deep and horrible twinges hard behind her breastbone, in the space under ribs that she’d thought would be a void ever since she first learned of Altea’s destruction. 

She stares into those impossibly blue eyes and her mouth is filled with words that spill out of her before she can think to stop them. “I’ll tell you,” she says—swears in the quiet place engendered between the two them as sacred as any temple. “Next time I get an idea like this. I’ll tell you, and we’ll go the two of us.”

It’s not a promise any of her other paladins could ever drag out of her. Not a promise that any of them would ever tolerate. But Lance’s answering smile is slow and slightly smug and shatters every piece of her heart to remake it into something she can only stand to consider sideways. 

“Deal,” he says.

**Author's Note:**

> Once again I thought this was gonna be a short fic. A little whump fic I was gonna write myself in an afternoon and then it became this. And then Mogi was all "oh hey, Chrono, you know what? This would make a great prequel to that _other_ project you've been poking at" and now I've, like, generated a 10 page outline for a multi-story arc because I lack impulse control. 
> 
> (But seriously, thank you for editing this mess and listening to me meltdown about characterization on the regular.)
> 
> edit: equation is from ["Core-collapse Supernova Equations of State Based on Neutron Star Observations" by Stiener, Hempel, and Fisher](https://arxiv.org/abs/1207.2184).


End file.
